Vibe coding and cost management
Published:
I tasked Claude with building me a scalable flight-tracker chatbot, and it ended up costing me $280 for 4 days of operation, when the estimate Claude gave me was $40/month.
The obvious problem was I didn’t know which AWS tools a flight-tracker app actually required. I also didn’t correctly estimate how much flight data would end up flowing through my system. I just don’t know a lot of things about this system. I can’t - because I’ve not tried building it myself. I accepted what Claude told me as the truth.
If I’m not learning new tech myself, I’m not having a lot of fun. And vibecoding takes the fun out of learning things. Maybe I’d have fun building things myself instead of telling Claude to do it for me.
Anyway, this was the inspiration behind hungry.city. Figured it needed it’s own blog post to keep this separate from the app’s explanation.
